Happy Existentialist Metaphors: Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World and the Chandos Complex

This article investigates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world. This concept brings a cosmological tone to existentialist phenomenology and challenges the grim and gnostic approach that prevails in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s works in particular. Is horror the key mood in ontology as argued by Malabou? This article contends that bright metaphors and magic realism are at least as fundamental, but under one condition: ontology must come to terms with what the author has coined as the “Chandos complex”, namely a form of ambivalence and oscillation between Gnosticism and holism that makes both positions fake and hollow. Dreaming of being one with the world and fantasizing an estrangement from nature work hand in hand and are equally staged. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy occasionally falls prey to the Chandos complex, which makes his concept of the flesh of the world vulnerable to criticism. This article examines the claim put forward by Renaud Barbaras that “the flesh of the world” is a failed metaphor. It argues that this blissful metaphor is ontologically fundamental as soon as its intrinsic paradoxes are recognized and accepted: the Chandos complex then becomes the key to an ontology that recognizes the imaginary as an essential dimension of being. At stake is an essential link between ontology on the one hand and, on the other hand, metaphors as well as myth-building and narrative-building processes.

Magic Realism in African Literature: A Study on Selected Works of Ben Okri and Nadine Gordimer

This article examines the evolution of magical realism as a narrative style used by African writers throughout the transition period, and how it became increasingly suited to African literary sensibilities at the time. At the same time, magical realism relies heavily on African oral traditions, serving as a site of convergence for black and white writing under apartheid, as well as exemplifying the synthesis of Eurocentric Western logic and African tradition. This article discusses the possible origins of the proliferation of African texts embracing this narrative mode in the immediate aftermath of apartheid's demise, as well as the possible reasons for the gradual abandonment of magical realist narrative strategy in the post-millennial era, while discussing magic realism in relation to Ben Okri's and Nadine Gordimer's post-apartheid novels. As a consequence of the short cohabitation of the two literary forms in African literary history, African magical realism works will be located at the intersection of celebration and disillusionment literature.

Blending of Fiction with Historical Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Grabiel Gracia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

This paper investigates the use of magic realism as a strategic tool in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Both the authors belong to two distinct continents; still, they have similar histories and stories of struggle. They develop a unique relationship while untangling reality. They create the mysterious relationship between the human beings and their circumstances in a way more realistic than the realist text.Also, the textual analysis reveals the basic goal of both the novelist to revisit their past through magic realism as both of them believe in the distortion of reality as outcome of colonial impact in their respective societies. In this sense, this paper justifies the rationale behind the blending of fiction and historical reality in both the novels. In doing so it explores how the unsayable in today’s world of asymmetrical power and domination could be said through the use of tools and elements of magic realism such as hybridity, authorial presence, metafiction, awareness of mystery in a real world setting.

A Comparative Study of Magic Realism in Works of Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter

Since the release of Gabriel Garciá Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Magical Realism has been in favour as a narrative style or genre in adult fiction. The representation of the genre in children’s and juvenile literature, on the other hand, is a recent trend; the components of the genre have been tracked and proven to be genuinely important in the interpretation of current children’s fiction, such as David Almond’s Skelling (1998). The aim of this paper is to look at the elements of magical realism in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus works in this respect.

The Elements of Supernatural and Magic Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

The present research paper is a study of the elements of Magic Realism and the supernatural elements in the novel, Beloved by the Nobel laureate novelist Toni Morrison. The term Magic Realism was originally applied in the 1920s to the school of surrealist German painters and was later used to describe the process fiction of writers like George Luis Burges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie etc. These writers weave a sharply etched realism representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dream-like elements, as well as with material derived from myth and fairy tales. The German critic Franz Roz introduced the concept of Magic realism in 1920 and it was first used in paintings. The term was introduced in the book Post-expressionism, Magic Realism: Problem of the Most Recent European Paintings in 1925. The purpose here is to analyze the elements of magic realism in the novel, Beloved. We can see supernatural elements in Sethe’s house that bring chaos by haunting everyone through its mysterious presence, and making Sethe’s both the sons Howard and Buglar run away. It appears to be the ghost of a baby which was murdered by Sethe. The ghost causes the things in the house to break and shake mysteriously. In magic realism fiction the ghosts are the central characters generally. In the novel Beloved Morrison has portrayed the ghost as a living person. Thus, the dominance of a unique, mystical and gloomy atmosphere can be seen throughout the novel.

Magic Realism and Experimental Fiction

In 1934, Argentinian editor and writer Victoria Ocampo commissioned Jorge Luis Borges the translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, to be published in 1935 and 1937, respectively, under the auspices of the intellectual circle ‘Sur’ (‘South’). These translations would inspire generations of writers, appealed by Woolf’s subversive strategies to trespass physical and psychological boundaries, and by her innovative conception of time, history, and gender, which anticipated what came to be later known as ‘magic realism’. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf’s influence affects the construction of alternative ontological realms that both coexist with and transcend identifiable historical sites in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, and Jeanette Winterson. The chapter further examines the different strategies these writers use to unsettle received assumptions pertaining to history and to propose alternative rewritings of it in Woolf’s wake.

Mathematics and Magic Realism: A Study of "The Raven Legend"

This article demonstrates that “The Raven Legend”, a Haida myth transcribed by Franz Boas in 1888, is full of (ethno)mathematical concepts that Haida society used to make sense of the natural, real world. Calculus can be used to model several segments of the story since the narrative relied heavily on ideas that a mathematician would identify as the concepts of infinity and mathematical limits.

Réalismes déclinistes du polar français contemporain : Nicolas Mathieu, Colin Niel, Antonin Varenne

The detective novel has long been described as a form of “authentic” realistic literature (Collovald et Neveu). However, this article analyzes how three contemporary French crime novels—Aux animaux la guerre by Nicolas Mathieu (2014), Seules les bêtes by Colin Niel (2017) and Battues by Antonin Varenne (2015)—challenge and reappropriate conventions of realism. The three country noir novels follow in the lineage of two important traditions of realism, nineteenth-century French classical realism (Dubois) and the social realism of the 1970s and 1980s “néo-polar” (Desnain). Yet rather than anchoring the novels in familiar territory, the authors blur topographical references, create a polyphonic narrative structure and set a horrific tone to provide symbolic and political commentary. The novels thus borrow from magic realism to depict a declining rural and working-class world.

Motherhood and Mother Nature: A Study of Myth and Magic through Amitav Ghosh’s and Wayétu Moore’s Selected Works

Contemporary thoughts in the fields of literature and science lead to an interdisciplinary effort to bring along the issues common to both disciplines involved. The post-colonial and post-modern era of literature see literature and society along and literary exponents stamp their responsibilities to take up the serious societal crises and bring the awareness arousing a socio-consciousness in the reading public. This paper tight spots magical realism as one of the experiential tools employed by authors, Amitav Gosh, an Indian writer and winner of the 54th Jnanpith award and Wayétu Moore, a Liberian-American author and entrepreneur, to discuss the contemporary issues such as immigration, climate change, enslavement, etc through the employment of myth and magic. Environmental Humanities is best explained with the advocacy of magic realism. Of all the important supernatural elements, (which is the formula of magic realism) presented in both of the selected novels, Gun Island (2019) and She Would Be King (2018), this paper in detail, deals with only two components that are common in both the texts. They are i) the omnipotent natural force, wind and ii) the most powerful and dangerous species, snake. Both of these components are presented as commanding aid of the two literary texts to progress towards the solution to the catastrophic environmental complications. Both novels employ characters bitten by poisonous snakes, attaining extraordinary powers and also one can witness the power of wind, as omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent natural force. This paper is comparison of collective unconsciousness of two authors and their artful works irrespective of their genders, age and geography.